Friday, June 30, 2017

Jason Nightingale visited our church about 2 1/2 years ago for one of our Thanksgiving celebrations. On that Saturday evening, he took about an hour to “tell” to us the Book of Revelation from Scripture. The next morning he “told” us more of Scripture, from 1 John, and spent some time applying it to our lives.

As a young man, Jason served in Viet Nam as a medic. He came home at the age of 24, and joined a traveling drama team called Covenant Players. He was not a believer at this point, but he started reading the Bible in order to better understand some of the plays that the troupe was performing. It was through his immersion in the Scriptures that he came to faith in Christ.

Jason believed that God was calling him to a ministry of Scripture-telling - of presenting Scripture to crowds of people in dramatic fashion, from memory. He thought it would take place on a stage, but, as it turned out, it was most often in local churches, like ours. His first project was to memorize the Book of Revelation. He completed that memory project in one month. He went on to memorize First Peter, and then sixteen other books of the Bible.

This immersion in Scripture - studying, memorizing, reviewing, and telling - produced many effects in his life. One of these was to feed a dynamic faith. One feature of this faith was that he expected results to issue forth from God and from His Word, not from the clever wielding of techniques with which the modern church seems to taken. Another feature of his faith was that the Bible was not just to be talked about, but to be obeyed. And so, later in his ministry, 27 years after first beginning Wordsower Ministries, Wordsower International came into being.

Wordsower International is a faith-based ministry seeking to help national pastors and churches minister to the overwhelming need of widows and orphans in Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and India. More recently, Wordsower has also gotten involved in Nepal, with a targeted goal to hinder the heinous practice of child-trafficking.

This winter, Jason was ordered by doctors to curtail his extensive traveling/telling ministry due to a severe heart condition. He died on April 19, at 68 years old. But he had one of the strongest hearts that I’ve seen in my Christian experience - a heart for God’s Word - a heart for Jesus - a heart for ministry - a heart of compassion. I pray that his influence will continue to be felt, and that the ministry will continue.

Friday, June 23, 2017

I do not tend to wax political in these articles, and it is not my intent here, though “a campaign of whisperers” may best be illustrated by a rather grand parade of leaks and anonymous sources which serve as the basis for so many ‘news’ stories of late. Every reporter seems to have some inside lackey in the halls of power - someone perhaps not-so-important but who can still give his/her impression of the current state of things. I wonder what their real job is. What are they paid to do? Is their reason for existence merely to give flimsy opinions to mediums of wide circulation? Is this really how government, and journalism works?I talk too much. There are times that I have sinned by not speaking up or speaking out. But more often, I’ve blurted out something beyond what should have been said. Those are the kinds of whisperings to which I’m referring - needless words that are based more on impression than on fact - and who cares about mere opinion anyway, whether mine, or yours?Whispering campaigns have destroyed many churches. And whispering campaigns have afflicted many Christians. People who do not know will criticize your beliefs and your motives. One Old Testament lament says, “The lips of my assailants and their whispering are against me all day long.” And as our secular society turns more and more against traditional morality, and Christianity in particular, expect that the whispering campaigns will be reinforced to accuse of narrowness and hatefulness and bigotry and racism and cruelty, etc. David said, “All who hate me whisper together against me; Against me they devise my hurt.” It doesn’t have to be true. It merely has to be whispered. Others will gladly do the transmitting.We can do little to protect ourselves from the whisperings of others, other than to be bold ourselves, and clear about who we are, what we stand for, and why we believe. It is interesting that, while Luke 12:3 says that their secret whisperings will one day be proclaimed on the housetops, Matthew 10:27 tells us to boldly proclaim what we have come to know and love. Our boldness can forestall their whispering.But let’s also be warned ourselves about being involved in whispering against others. That’s not why we are here. It’s not our calling, nor our mission. If we can’t say it out loud, then let us not say it at all. And if it is going to be unhelpful or untrue, then let’s close our mouths until God gives us something important to say.

Friday, June 16, 2017

A fearful incident will focus one’s attention and prompt decisive action. It could be your child falling down the stairs; a notice of foreclosure due to unpaid bills; an unwelcome report from a doctor due to long-ignored health conditions. Those kinds of things, and many more, will get your attention. Wise and reasonable people will respond.

This, of course, rarely applies to parental instruction. We all have received warnings and directives that we have long ignored. It seems the more often we hear them, the more we tend to not even hear, like the drip from a faucet. Of course, moving up and out helps too.

Not all parental instruction is gospel truth. Nor is every word preached from the pulpit. But there, too, heedings and pleadings are too often regarded as Sunday, rhetorical flourishes. The preacher wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t say those things. Hey, we even know what he’s going to say even before he says it. And, if you don’t like hearing it week after week, you can go somewhere else, or nowhere at all. But the tough considerations needed to put things into practice and effect change are most often long lost by Monday morning.

Proverbs 1 is an introduction to the task of parents and preachers. It is also an appeal for those who would truly listen in order that they might actually heed - please, heed - the message and take appropriate measures. And it is in this Bible chapter, - wisdom calling out, finding distressingly few hearers/reponders, - that we find the phrase that heads this article: the complacency of fools.

Urgency is stolen away by complacency. Sharp focus is dissolved by distraction. Preachers preach, but delay and comfortable patterns of life rule the day, and the next, and the next. And then, what will happen indeed happens. The consequences of foolishness, born out of the complacency of fools, will one day fasten themselves upon you, no matter how wise and reasonable you fancy yourself to be. There will be an accident, perhaps more serious than before. Debt will devour your future, and you will be left grasping for a bailout. Your health will fail you, perhaps because you failed your health. Or, ultimately, you will stand before God, with precious little to say. And you will have earned the title that the Bible gives to those who will not listen to good parents and preachers: fool. And then it will all be crystal-clear, on that day when “they are destroyed in a moment! They are utterly swept away by sudden terrors!” (Psalms 73:19)

Friday, June 09, 2017

The Old Testament saint Job says, “man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward.” And he should know. Once his life was the picture of remarkable blessedness. Then trouble hit. He became a “child of woe.”

We, by-and-large, live lives that are extremely blessed, interrupted by trouble. There are others who live lives of endless woe, rarely interrupted by blessing. For many of us, our woes are self-inflicted. We have at least contributed to the cause of our trouble, whether in the area of finances, or health, or relationships. We spent the money we did not have. We failed to follow general rules of health. We keep damaging relationships, thinking that the other person should change, not us.

Other woes seem to come naturally. Aging, whether it happen to your body, or to the septic system, happens. Nothing in this world lasts forever. And when it wears out, we have to go through the pain and expense of fixing or replacing it, if it is fixable at all.

And then there are woes that are unpredictable. Perhaps some would call them accidental. Believers, if consistent, would call them providential. You get blind-sided by another driver - his fault, not yours. A tornado takes out the house, or cancer, like lightning, strikes close to home. And once again you fit the description: child of woe.

This is the case for everyone: religious/non-religious. No one escapes. But some interpret it differently than others.

Those who hold to orthodox Christianity understand that God, far and away bigger and wiser than mere man, sees the big picture, and allows woes for a variety of reasons, many of which do not have to do exclusively with me or how I feel about it. We are but bit players in a larger drama, and we seldom truly know “why?”. But we also understand and experience that we as ‘bit players’ are at the same time ‘blessed players.’ We are on personal terms with the central, heroic figure in the whole drama that spans not only continents, but the far reaches of both heaven and earth, as well as eternity past and future. We know him, and trust him, even when it hurts, and even when we are scared to death.

We used to sing this old song, “Take the name of Jesus with you, child of sorrow and of woe. It will joy and comfort give you. Take it everywhere you go.” And then a line from the chorus: “Precious name, … hope of earth and joy of heaven.”

Saturday, June 03, 2017

There is a household where two members are called Big Will and little will. Big Will is the dad, and little will is his son. I suppose Will probably is short for William, but there is nothing short about Big Will.

Big Will is undoubtably the head of the house. He makes all the big decisions. What he says goes, and everybody know it. Especially little will. Most of the time.

little will gets to make lots of decisions, every single day. He makes even more decisions than he knows. We all make many decisions without even realizing it, often without even thinking about them. And that’s fine. That’s how things work, just so long as little will’s decisions do not cross Big Will’s decisions.

Now the world is not perfect, and neither is little will. There are times when he is not content to exercise his little will in the areas of freedom that are left to him; areas that do not conflict with what Big Will has communicated. Sometimes, little will wants to give himself a little more room, to make his say-so a little larger. And so, yes, he has violated the will and word of Big Will. That has not gone well.

Now just in case you don’t get it yet, this is a parable. Big Will is clearly God, about whom we sing “This Is My Father’s World.” And little will is you and me. We live in God’s world, and we are His subjects. Whether we recognize it or not, our wills must always act under the umbrella of His will, and when we choose to exercise our wills out from under that umbrella, we get wet, though sometimes God can rain down fire instead of water. When we cross God’s will, there are consequences.

The consequences are not always immediate. They can be delayed. They can be subtle. But they are certain. And if we do not experience consequences this side of death, we are told in Scripture that there is a serious sit-down with God on the other side, and it will be difficult, no, ludicrous, to try and explain a good reason why we replaced His Will with ours when we are confronted by the majesty of God in His glory.

To some, this may sound oppressive. I’m sorry if it sounds that way. Evidently you were raised in a home where you did anything you wanted, and were not taught to obey your parents, because it is that training, in part, that prepares us to respect and obey God.